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the fatal scene of his friend's at a loss for a meaning, a meandisaster.

But the poetry is not always unconnected with passion. The poet lavishly describes an ancient sepulchral rite, but it is made preparatory to a stroke of tenderness. He calls for a variety of flowers to decorate his friend's hearse, supposing that his body was present, and forgetting for a while that it was floating far off in the ocean. If he was drowned, it was some consolation that he was to receive the decencies of burial. This is a pleasing deception: it is natural and pathetic. But the real catastrophe recurs. And this circumstance again opens a new vein of imagination.

Dr. Johnson censures Milton for his allegorical mode of telling that he and Lycidas studied together, under the fictitious images of rural employments, in which, he says, there can be no tenderness; and prefers Cowley's lamentation of the loss of Harvey, the companion of his labours, and the partner of his discoveries. I know not if, in this similarity of subject, Cowley has more tenderness; I am sure he has less poetry. I will allow that he has more wit, and more smart similies. The sense of our author's allegory on this occasion is obvious, and is just as intelligible as if he had used plain terms. It is a fiction, that when Lycidas died, the woods and caves were deserted and overgrown with wild thyme and luxuriant vines, and that all their echoes mourned; and that the green copses no longer waved their joyous leaves to his soft strains but we cannot here be

ing which is as clearly perceived, as it is elegantly represented. This is the sympathy of a true poet. We know that Milton and King were not nursed on the same hill; that they did not feed the same flock, by fountain, shade, or rill; and that rough Satyrs and Fauns with cloven heel never danced to their ruralditties. But who hesitates a moment for the application? Nor are such ideas more untrue, certainly not less far-fetched and unnatural, than when Cowley says, that he and Harvey studied together every night with such unremitted diligence, that the twin-stars of Leda, so famed for love, looked down upon the twin-students with wonder from above. And where is the tenderness, when he wishes, that, on the melancholy event, the branches of the trees at Cambridge, under which they walked, would combine themselves into a darker umbrage, dark as the grave in which his departed friend was newly laid?

Our author has also been censured for mixing religious disputes with pagan and pastoral ideas. But he had the authority of Mantuan and Spenser, now considered as models in this way of writing. Let me add, that our poetry was not yet purged from its Gothic combinations; nor had legitimate notions of discrimination and propriety so far prevailed, as sufficiently to influence the growing improvements of English composition. These irregularities and incongruities must not be tried by modern criticism.

XVIII.

The Fifth Ode of Horace, Lib. I.

Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa, rendered almost word for word without rhyme, according to the Latin measure, as near as the language will permit.

WHAT slender youth bedew'd with liquid odours
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,
Pyrrha? for whom bind'st thou

In wreaths thy golden hair,

Plain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he

This Ode was first added in the second edition of the author's poems in 1673.

1. What slender youth] In this measure, my friend and school-fellow Mr. William Collins wrote his admired Ode to Evening; and I know he had a design of writing many more Odes without rhyme. In this measure also, an elegant Ode was written on the Paradise Lost, by the late Captain Thomas, formerly a Student of Christ Church, Oxford, at the time that Mr. Benson gave medals as prizes for the best verses that were produced on Milton at all our great schools. It seems to be an agreed point, that Lyric poetry cannot exist without rhyme in our language. Some of the Trochaics, in Glover's Medea, are harmonious, however, without rhyme. Dr. J. Warton.

Dr. J. Warton might have added, that his own Ode to Evening was written before that of his friend Collins; as was a Poem of his, entitled the As

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sembly of the Passions, before Collins's favourite Ode on that subject.

There are extant two excellent Odes, of the truest taste, written in unrhyming metre many years ago by two of the students of Christ Church, Oxford, and among its chief ornaments, since high in the church. One is on the death of Mr, Langton, who died on his travels, by the late Dr. Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph: the other, by the present Archbishop of York, is addressed to George Onslow, Esquire, the Speaker. But it may be doubted, whether there is sufficient precision and elegance in the English language without rhyme. In England's Helicon, there is none's complaint in blank verse, by George Peele, written about 1590. The verses indeed are heroic, but the whole consists of quatrains. T. Warton.

5. Plain in thy neatness?] Rather "" plain in your orna"ments." Milton mistakes the

On faith and changed Gods complain, and seas
Rough with black winds and storms
Unwonted shall admire!

Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold,
Who always vacant always amiable

Hopes thee, of flattering gales

Unmindful. Hapless they

To whom thou untried seem'st fair. Me in

Picture the sacred wall declares t' have hung
My dank and dropping weeds

To the stern God of sea.

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my

vow'd

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Ad Pyrrham. Ode V.

Horatius ex Pyrrhæ illecebris tanquam e naufragio enataverat, cujus amore irretitos, affirmat esse miseros.

QUIS multa gracilis te puer in rosa

Perfusus liquidis urget odoribus,
Grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?

Cui flavam religas comam

Simplex munditiis? heu quoties fidem
Mutatosque deos flebit, et aspera
Nigris æquora ventis
Emirabitur insolens!

Qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea,

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"whom do you, who study no "ornaments of dress, thus unaf"fectedly bind up your yellow "For "locks?" T. Warton.

idiomatical use of munditiæ. She was plain in her dress, or in the manner of adorning herself. The sense of the context is,

Qui semper vacuam semper amabilem

Sperat, nescius auræ

Fallacis. Miseri quibus

Intentata nites. Me tabula sacer

Votiva paries indicat uvida

Suspendisse potenti

Vestimenta maris Deo.

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15

FRAGMENTS OF TRANSLATIONS*.
GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH'.

BRUTUS thus addresses DIANA in the country of LEOGECIA.
GODDESS of shades, and huntress, who at will
Walk'st on the rowling† spheres, and through the

deep;

On thy third reign the earth look now, and tell

What land, what seat of rest, thou bidd'st me seek,
What certain seat, where I may worship thee

For aye, with temples vow'd, and virgin quires.

To whom, sleeping before the altar, DIANA answers in a vision the same night.

Brutus, far to the west, in th' ocean wide,
Beyond the realm of Gaul, a land there lies,

* These fragments of translations, taken from various parts of Milton's Prose Works, I insert from Mr. Warton's edition; omitting, however, those from Milton's Defensio, which Mr. Warton adopts from preceding editions, but which he himself

states to be the work, not of
Milton, but of Washington the
Translator of the Defensio. See
the following note b. E.
Hist. Brit. i. xi.
"tens nemorum, &c."
+ Tickell and Fenton read
lowring.

"Diva po

Sea-girt it lies, where giants dwelt of old,
Now void, it fits thy people: thither bend

Thy course, there shalt thou find a lasting seat;
There to thy sons another Troy shall rise,

And kings be born of thee, whose dreadful might
Shall awe the world, and conquer nations bold."

DANTE.C

Ah Constantine, of how much ill was cause,
Not thy conversion, but those rich domains
That the first wealthy pope receiv'd of thee.d

DANTE.

Founded in chaste and humble poverty,

'Gainst them that rais'd thee dost thou lift thy horn,
Impudent whore, where hast thou plac'd thy hope?
In thy adulterers, or thy ill-got wealth?
Another Constantine comes not in haste.f

From Milton's Hist. Engl. b. i. Pr. W. ii. 5. These Fragments of translation were collected by Tickell from Milton's Prose Works. More are here added. But those taken from the Defensio are not Milton's, but are in Richard Washington's Translation of the Defensio into English. Tickell, supposing that Milton translated his own Latin Defensio into English, has inserted them among these fragments of Translations as the productions of Milton. reprinted Richard Washington's translation, which appeared in 1692, 8vo. among our author's

Birch has

Prose Works. T. Warton. • Infern. c. xix. See Hoole's Ariosto, b. xvii. v. 552. vol. ii. p. 271.

d From Of Reformation in England, Prose Works, vol. i. p. 10.

← Parad. c. xx. So say Tickell and Fenton, from Milton himself. But the sentiment only is in Dante. The translation is from Petrarch, Sonn. 108. "Fun"data in casta et humili pover"tate, &c." Expunged in some editions of Petrarch for obvious reasons. T. Warton.

f From Of Reformation, &c. Prose Works, vol. i. p. 10.

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